Orthopedic surgeon Vonda Wright, 59, defies the “time bombs” of aging with a one-two punch of mindset and tactics. She’ll test that plan as a Founding Athlete at the Super Age Games.

When most middle-agers think about how to become Super Agers, they start with their gym or kitchen: They should eat better! And exercise more! But real change doesn’t start with what’s on your plate, or even the plates on the barbell, says Dr. Vonda Wright, MD. It starts between your ears.

“None of that matters until we understand what we value, set goals accordingly, and have enough self-worth to execute,” the orthopedic surgeon and midlife expert says. When we don’t change our mindset to believe we’re worth those big changes, they won’t stick, she adds. That starts by knowing that the results we want are possible.  

“The biggest myth that I have been trying to dispel since the very beginning of my career is that aging is an inevitable decline from the vitality of youth to the frailty of old age, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Wright tells Super Age. “We can be healthy, vital, active, joyful long into the foreseeable future,” she adds — but to get there, we can’t just set an age goal and continue doing what we’ve done since our 20s. “Longevity[lon-jev-i-tee]nounLiving a long life; influenced by genetics, environment, and lifestyle.Learn MoreClose is not a timeline. It’s a design plan.”

The roadmap Wright set for herself has turned her life around, from feeling lost and frail at 47 to now feeling stronger than ever at the age of 59. In November, she’ll put that hard work to the test as a Founding Athlete at the first-ever Super Age Games.

4 Steps for Defusing the “Time Bombs” of Aging

Wright had always been able to do, as she puts it, what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it. She was a dancer, a marathon runner, an orthopedic surgeon for NFL and NHL teams, and a mom at 40. She always felt in control of her body and mind.

But at 47, suddenly she wasn’t. The drip-drip-drip of physical decline had developed into a pool of maladies, and she felt like she was starting to drown — or worse, nearing a heart attack.

“It wasn’t just ‘not feeling like myself.’ I was waking up with heart palpitations,” she says. “And it scared the bejesus out of me, because my family dies of heart disease[hahrt dih-zeez]nounConditions affecting heart health and circulation.Learn MoreClose. Every generation.”

There was more. Despite being in the best shape of her life, Wright began experiencing debilitating, all-over body aches. And she noticed her mind slipping. While in surgery, she’d have trouble coming up with the name of an instrument she wanted a nurse to hand her.

“When I hit peri-menopause and my estrogen walked out the door,” she says, “I became not the athlete I was. I became not the thinker I was.”

But instead of chalking it up to “just getting old,” Wright got to work on a plan — not just for herself, but for her patients and fellow middle agers who couldn’t lift like they used to, couldn’t think and move like they used to, and couldn’t solve the mounting problem of aging.

“It prompted me to become the expert I am now on midlife, and on the role of hormones in both men and women in midlife aging, because it’s profound,” she says. For her female patients, she gave the symptoms a name: The musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. “That gave a language to, ‘I don’t feel like myself, I’m falling apart, I think I’m going crazy,’ and gave a root cause explanation so that research could be done and so doctors could talk about it.”

It also prompted her to design a plan for herself. Wright turned her energy, body, mind, and aging around with four changes every Super Ager can adopt:

1. Change Your Mindset: Wright’s mindset shift wasn’t just to convince herself she was worth the effort. It was a shift to be more like the professional athletes she treats.

“They don’t just hang out waiting for the time to pass until the competition to see if they succeed,” she says. “No. Every single minute of their lives is planned.”

While she’s stopped short of going “minute by minute,” Wright says she now puts more effort into planning: what she eats, how she sleeps, and the movements she prioritizes. She’s traded in all the well-worn habits that worked in her younger years (but don’t anymore) for interventions designed to improve her long-term outcomes.

2. Focus on Exercise: Wright was always into endurance, following in her father’s footsteps as she trained for marathons. But in her longevity design, she now focuses on powerlifting, eschewing tiny dumbbells for heavy weights in the squat, bench press, and deadlift. She supplements these “big three” exercises of powerlifting with single-leg moves designed to keep her athletic: Wright feels powerful, she says, doing a dumbbell step-up during her two to four lifting sessions each week.

For cardio, she traded in long, slow runs for polarized training. This means doing lots of easy work each week, performed at a pace where you can still hold a conversation, and then some extremely hard, sprinting work. For her easier efforts, Wright does 45-minute sessions of walking on an incline on the treadmill. And a few times per week, she dials it up to four 30-second, all-out sprints.

3. Optimize Your Hormones: We’ve known for decades that many of the maladies of aging, from increased arthritis in women to reduced tendon strength in men, results from changes in our hormones, Wright says. But these changes are often treated as a disease, not a problem to be solved.

Wright set out to change that for herself and others. She researched the impact of hormone balance and replacement, tested her own, and worked to optimize them for better outcomes. 

4. Reassess How You Eat (and Drink): Wright’s alcohol intake was already minimal, but more recently, she’s cut it out completely. She also kicked sugar to the curb, saying the reduction in inflammation[in-fluh-mey-shuhn]nounYour body’s response to an illness, injury or something that doesn’t belong in your body (like germs or toxic chemicals).Learn MoreClose made her feel better. “It’s not a sacrifice for me,” she notes.

Even when she’s not cutting something out completely, she tries to make more thoughtful choices. When she’s ordering at a restaurant, “I’m searching for the big thing of vegetables, and I don’t want them fried. I ask them to be grilled, and I leave the sauce off.” 

Testing Her Longevity Design at the Super Age Games

To assess how her plan is going, Wright worked with a data scientist for her book, “Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power,” coming up with 10 tests to measure her longevity.

So when she first heard of the Super Age Games from founder David Stewart, she knew the event was a perfect fit.

“We’re trying to quantify the building of longevity, and avoid the time bombs,” she says. “My whole life is about aging well, designing my longevity, living at the top of my mental and physical game. And I think that’s what [the Super Age Games] are trying to measure.”

Her own plan continues to evolve, and at 59, the surgeon is continuing to challenge herself. 

In the weeks before the Super Age Games, she’ll complete three marathons in three days at the 29029 Trail event in Park City, Utah. To succeed, she’s got a plan: After years away from distance running, she’s mixing up her training once again, balancing power lifts, sprints, and climbs that cover the distance from ground level to Everest Base Camp.

That same training will prepare her for the inaugural Super Age Games, where she hopes to drive her signature message home for her fellow female Super Agers: That they can do what they want, when they want.

“I want everybody to wake up and recognize that we can step in front of this cataclysmic aging that happens to women in their 40s and 50s,” she says, “by gaining knowledge, optimizing our hormones, and investing in our physical and mental bodies.”

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